Hi Everybody, just wanted to point out that with the latest emphasis on eBooks (Amazon's Kindle and Sony's eReader) we've all really been given a great opportunity to add another small, but environmentally beneficial change to our lives. eBooks, it would seem, use no paper, no fuel for delivery, and none of the harsh printing or paper manufacturing practices used by traditional publishing companies. EcoBrain.com is another new eBook store. It's actually in the Greeniacs Directory. The cool thing is that they sell books in eBook format from top environmental publishers, about green living. URL is http://www.ecobrain.com/

I've been wondering, with all this talk about online books and not printing emails/articles to save paper, do we end up reducing pollution even though we are using more electricity for the computer? Does anyone know the comparison between pollution caused by paper and printing as compared to electricity to power a computer.

Great question!

this points to the issue of all raising the intelligence of the average consumer to a level where we must comprehend methods of production in order to select products that agree with our personal "green values".

it's a tossup.

nothing is 100% green if it has multiple steps of production, which include delivery of the product, or extended energy use.

If a person buys an ebook and then prints it out, they must use electricity to buy it, and ink and paper to print it out.I don't know much about ebook readers, but I assume they can be battery powered as well as plugged in for electrical power from the grid.

If a person buys the same book which was printed by a book printer, packaged in the factory and then distributed to stores by gas powered truck or air shipment...how green is it?

Great question...if anybody knows I'd love to hear it. I've heard recently that biofuels are more costly and detrimental than fossil fuels!
It's mind boggling.

I looked into this a little bit...and found an interesting report put out by Energy Star. Although they did not give the actual comparison between each different form of energy, I did learn:

*10 times more energy is used to manufacture a piece of paper than to copy an image on the paper.

*An ENERGY STAR qualified computer uses 70% less electricity than computers without enabled power management features

From gathering information from various different sources, it seems that our best option would be to avoid as much paper production as possible and start taking steps to green our computers.

Great Energy Star stats, thanks! Also, I'd like to point out that eBooks don't need to be printed out. Most of the books at EcoBrain and other sites are informational, vegan recipe books, instruction books and such. So, it would make sense to only print out the materials list, or certain sections of the books, rather than the whole thing, including unecessary copyright pages, title pages etc. Also, generations much younger than myself are quite comfortable reading entire books on their computers. Traditional paper printing and paper manufacturing practices are extremely damaging to the environment. ebooks are created easily and use no more energy than what it takes an average Joe to read their e-mail each day. And hugely significant, I think, is that a massive margin of books are now printed overseas in Asia and not only have to be shipped by boat to the US, but also trucked across country to distribution warehouses. I'll never give up printed books, but I'll absolutely choose eBooks sometimes too, especially since they appear to be significantly cheaper than their printed counterparts. A lot of times it is a toss-up (For example, I like to rinse out my recycling jars and cans and I often wonder if it's even worth the effort, with as much water as it takes to do the rinsing) but I think eBooks are clearly a better choice. No toss-up there, in my opinion!

I found a stat that says it takes about the equivelent 60 watt-hours of energy to produce one piece of paper (assuming non-recycled paper and anywhere from 15-250 watt-hours to run a computer for an hour depending on what kind (laptops tend to be more energy efficient than desktops) and how hard it is working. So in the worst case it takes about the same amount of energy to run a computer for an hour as to manufacture 4 pieces of paper. That's not even taking into account the printing and shipping of the book. So unless you read very very slowly, reading e-books on the computer wins hands down for energy efficiency.

Many books, particularly ones owned by libraries are read over and over. If a book was read over 15 times, it would begin to become more energy efficient (not counting printing and shipping), depending on what kind of computer you were using and how fast you read. Some books in libraries are read hundreds of times.

But in general an e-book seems more energy efficient, particularly if its something that you wouldn't read more than once anyway.